Monday, May 20, 2024, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Michael A. Cohen with the 2024 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award.

The Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Vision Research, is given to an early-career vision scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical, or applied. The award selection committee gives highest weight to the significance, originality and potential long-range impact of the work. The selection committee may also take into account the nominee’s previous participation in VSS conferences or activities, and substantial obstacles that the nominee may have overcome in their careers. The awardee is asked to give a brief presentation of her/his work and is required to write an article to be published in Vision Research.

Michael A. Cohen

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology & Program in Neuroscience, Amherst College; Research Scientist, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The 2024 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Michael A. Cohen for his fundamental contributions to the scientific study of perceptual awareness. Michael Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience at Amherst College and is also a Research Scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After completing his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at Tufts University working with Daniel C. Dennett., Prof Cohen did his PhD with George Alvarez and Ken Nakayama at Harvard and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher.

Dr. Cohen’s research seeks to understand the cognitive and neural factors that determine which information in the world is consciously perceived by an observer and ultimately reaches perceptual awareness. Early in his career, he wrote several articles focusing on the theoretical foundations of consciousness studies, with special attention paid to attention and the limits of perceptual awareness. As a graduate student, he then spent considerable time relating the organization of the visual system to a wide variety of cognitive abilities including working memory, visual search, and perceptual awareness. His more recent work has focused on understanding how much of the world observers perceive at a given moment and what neural processes are necessary for information to transition from unconscious to conscious. Throughout his career, Dr. Cohen has received an impressive series of grants from the NIH, NSF, CIFAR, and the Templeton Foundation. Across his career, he has used a variety of experimental techniques including traditional psychophysics, head-mounted virtual reality (VR), EEG, fMRI, and various computational modelling techniques. Dr. Cohen’s research exemplifies the intersection between combining various high-level theoretical frameworks with precise, cutting-edge experimentation to make fundamental contributions to vision science.

Dr. Cohen will speak during the Awards session.

Monday, May 20, 2024, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Isabel Gauthier with the 2024 Davida Teller Award

Congratulations to Isabel Gauthier, the twelfth recipient of the Davida Teller Award. The Teller Award was created to honor the late Davida Teller’s exceptional scientific achievements, commitment to equity, and strong history of mentoring. The award is given to a female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, significant, or lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Isabel Gauthier

David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University

Dr. Isabel Gauthier is the David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University and also holds an appointment in Radiology and Radiological Sciences. Following a B. A. in Psychology at the Université du Québec a Montréal in 1993, she obtained a PhD from Yale University Department of Psychology in 1998 under the mentorship of Dr Michael Tarr. She completed two concurrent postdocs, at MIT with Dr Nancy Kanwisher and at Yale with Dr John C. Gore.

Dr. Gauthier is a leader in the study of object recognition from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Her expert and distinctive blend of behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed the mechanisms subserving complex pattern recognition, demonstrating on these the effects of experience, specificity, and individual differences. In one of her early, highly influential studies, Dr Gauthier showed that naïve observers trained to recognize a new set of 3D rendered objects (‘Greebles’), evinced holistic processing and activation for Greebles in the Fusiform Face Area. This revolutionary demonstration went against the grain of many studies of face perception and its neural correlates, and the theoretical argument in favour of expertise was further revealed in studies of car and bird experts. In the early 2010s, Dr Gauthier’s interests in expertise expanded to the study of individual differences in object recognition. She used latent variable models to provide evidence for a domain-general visual ability that is independent of general cognitive abilities. This line of work has extended to individual differences in object recognition in the haptic and auditory modalities, and to general abilities in ensemble perception.

Dr. Gauthier’s research contributions have been widely recognized. She has received the Young Investigator Award, Cognitive Neuroscience Society; the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology; and the Troland research award from the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Psychonomic Society and is a member of AAAS.  Dr. Gauthier has demonstrated exemplary commitment to her academic institution, serving as Vice Chair, Department of Psychology. Dr Gauthier has been widely recognized as a supportive and influential mentor to many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and undergraduate students. At Vanderbilt, she was awarded the Graduate mentoring award from the College of Arts and Science in 2012 and the Excellence in Graduate student mentoring award from the Graduate School in 2024. She was recognized as the SEC Professor of the year in 2015. Dr Gauthier has also made significant contributions to the broader vision sciences community. In 2000, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network, linking over ten laboratories across North America in collaborations until 2017. Dr Gauthier was an Associate Editor at JEP:HPP from 2005 to 2011, Editor of JEP:General from 2011 to 2017 and Editor of JEP:HPP since 2017. She has proudly mentored many editors and associate editors who now serve in many other journals.

Monday, May 20, 2024, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Randolph Blake with the 2024 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence in the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

Randolph Blake

Centennial Professor of Psychology and Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, Vanderbilt University

Randolph Blake has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science. This honor recognizes his diverse, original, and enduring contributions. Blake is well known for many insights into the mechanisms of binocular vision and of the perceptual ambiguity of binocular rivalry. Other research elucidated basic principles of motion perception ranging from biological motion and structure from motion to basic center-surround properties. He also led discoveries of visual form from temporal structure and of traveling waves in visual cortex. Blake’s impact extends further to principles of multisensory integration and insights into synesthesia. His rigorous psychoanatomy approaches were complemented by formal models, functional brain imaging, and investigation of individuals diagnosed with autism, Williams syndrome, and schizophrenia. Blake’s contributions to the vision science community have been amplified through the well-known Perception textbook with Robert Sekuler, through his pivotal role in establishing the Vision Science Society, and by his mentorship of generations of laboratory trainees and faculty colleagues in his department, university, and field who carry forward his discernment and integrity. Moreover, Blake’s exemplary and passionate approach to undergraduate education have been recognized by the most prominent teaching awards at Northwestern and at Vanderbilt.

Randolph Blake earned a bachelor’s degree in 1967 from the University of Texas in Arlington followed by a PhD in 1972 working with Robert Fox at Vanderbilt University. After two years of postdoctoral training at Baylor College of Medicine, he joined the faculty of psychology at Northwestern University in 1974 and rose through the ranks. In 1988 he returned to Vanderbilt as Chair of the Department of Psychology to oversee a move into a new building and a reorganization of the department research priorities. Blake’s contributions have been recognized previously by an Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association and later by election to the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. He received an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006 for explaining why fingernails scraping on a chalkboard are unpleasant. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the Association for Psychological Science, the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, and the Psychonomic Society. He was a foreign scholar in the World Class University Initiative sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea and is a member of the Alumni Association of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Meet the Professors

Workshop for PhD Students and Postdocs

Undergrad Meet & Greet

Career Transitions Workshop, Part 1: Early Career Panel

Monday, May 22, 2023, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Brian A. Anderson with the 2023 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award.

The Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Vision Research, is given to an early-career vision scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical, or applied. The award selection committee gives highest weight to the significance, originality and potential long-range impact of the work. The selection committee may also take into account the nominee’s previous participation in VSS conferences or activities, and substantial obstacles that the nominee may have overcome in their careers.   The awardee is asked to give a brief presentation of her/his work and is required to write an article to be published in Vision Research.

Brian A. Anderson

Associate Professor, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University

The 2023 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Brian A. Anderson for his seminal contributions to understanding of visual attention and cognition. Dr. Anderson is an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University, where he also serves as the Director of Human Imaging. After graduating summa cum laude at the University of Maine at Augusta with a degree in Social Science, Dr. Anderson obtained an M.S. in Psychology working with Charles Folk at Villanova University and then a Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences with Steven Yantis at Johns Hopkins, where he also completed a short postdoctoral fellowship.

Dr. Anderson’s research has provided fundamental insights into the mechanisms of visual attention. He pioneered a method for studying how the relationship between reward and visual stimuli in one task setting can impact the allocation of attention in other contexts. This resulted in the striking discovery that visual features previously associated with rewards continue to draw attention even when those features are neither relevant nor salient. This value-driven form of attentional capture also provides a useful model for understanding failures of value-based cognitive control, such as in addiction. Dr. Anderson’s work has further examined the relationship of value-based attention to dopamine signaling and to the processing of both aversive and rewarding stimuli. Dr. Anderson has had an immense impact of the field, having published over 80 original research articles and 10 review articles, and earning recognitions from the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Psychonomic Society. He has mentored many graduate, masters and undergraduate students, postdocs, and postbacs, who themselves have first authored many papers and received many awards. Dr. Anderson’s accomplishments illustrate how insights from basic vision science can impact multiple disciplines and translate to the clinic and beyond.

Elsevier/Vision Research Article

Dr. Anderson will speak during the Awards session.

[play-zoom-recording session=”1084″]

Monday, May 22, 2023, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

We are pleased to honor our awardees at the VSS 2023 Awards Session.

Monday, May 22, 2023, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Mary A. Peterson with the 2023 Davida Teller Award

Congratulations to Mary A. Peterson, the eleventh recipient of the Davida Teller Award. The Teller Award was created to honor the late Davida Teller’s exceptional scientific achievements, commitment to equity, and strong history of mentoring. The award is given to a female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, significant, or lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Mary A. Peterson

Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona

Dr. Mary A. Peterson is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. Following a B.A. in English Literature from Marymount Manhattan College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1972, Mary decided to change direction. Ultimately, she decided to study visual perception with Julian Hochberg at Columbia University (1978-1983). After starting as an Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, she moved the University of Arizona in 1988.

Dr. Peterson is a leader in the study of perceptual organization and a pioneer in the modern study of figure-ground processing. She has employed clever behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and patient work to demonstrate that perceptual organization is an iterative process in which past experience impacts all “stages” of perception. Although her revolutionary ideas and compelling data initially went against the grain of the then-prevailing theories of perception as a serial bottom-up process, her innovative perspective has now become the predominant way that vision scientists think about perception. Her research contributions have been widely recognized, including her election to fellow status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), and the International Neuropsychological Symposium (INS).

Dr. Peterson has been exemplary in her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Spurred by discussions at VSS 2015, she and a team of other women co-founded Females of Vision et al. (FoVea) to advance the visibility, impact, and success of women in vision science, with Mary spearheading a National Sciences Foundation grant to fund travel & networking awards, mentorship events, and other initiatives. FoVea events have become a vital part of the annual VSS meeting and have continually ensured that the mandate serves a range of marginalized groups. Mary has also been an advocate and ally to marginalized groups through service to her University, the Psychonomic Society, and Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS).

Mary has been widely recognized as a supportive and influential mentor, both to individuals and communities. In 2019, she was awarded an Excellence in Mentoring Award from the University of Arizona and the Early Career Psychologist Champion Award from the APA.

Dr. Peterson has been a member of the Board of Directors for VSS, served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, was co-founder and President of the Configural Processing Consortium, and has been active in the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS). She received the Psychonomic Society’s highest honor, the Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award.

Monday, May 22, 2023, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present William H. (Bill) Warren with the 2023 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.

The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence in the domain of vision sciences.

The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.

William H. (Bill) Warren

Chancellor’s Professor, Brown University

Bill Warren received his B.A. in 1976 from Hampshire College concentrating in Psychology, Biology and Philosophy and a Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Connecticut in Experimental Psychology with Robert Shaw and Michael Turvey. Following a brief post-doctoral stint at the University of Edinburgh with David Lee, he became faculty at Brown University, where he is now Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. In 1998, he founded the Virtual Environment Navigation Lab (VENLab) to study perception and action, well before the recent adoption of virtual reality techniques in research.

Bill Warren has broadened the view of vision at VSS to include many questions about how vision guides people’s interactions with the real and virtual world, which is obviously what vision is really for. His work has revealed how people use vision to perceive their environment, as well as how they subsequently control their actions. The former involves demonstrating people’s proficiency at judging affordances, surface layout, and self-motion. The latter involves demonstrating how adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. Bill has examined all this in a rigorous manner for a wide variety of topics such as judging whether one can step onto or pass between surfaces, judging where one is heading on the basis of the optic flow, controlling locomotion between obstacles, towards targets, and in large crowds, and navigating over longer distances. He has collaborated with movement scientists on visual-motor coordination, with biologists on insect flight control, with computer scientists on collective crowd dynamics, and with safety researchers on emergency evacuation. He has consistently combined experimental, computational and theoretical analyses of the problems he has tackled, often exposing implicit assumptions that others are making. Finally, he used mobile virtual reality — long before it became popular and accessible — to conduct ground-breaking experiments on how walking subjects use visual information to guide naturalistic behavior in controlled settings. Building on the theoretical insights of James Gibson, he has introduced the VSS community to a new way of considering vision. His work has been instrumental in defining the field that we know as Perception and Action.  

Bill is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship, Brown’s Teaching Award for Excellence in the Life Sciences, and is an elected Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He has been Professeur Invité at the University of Paris Orsay and the University of Aix-Marseille, and is currently President of the International Society for Ecological Psychology.

Monday, May 16, 2022, 12:30 – 1:45 pm EDT, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev with the 2022 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award.

The Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Vision Research, is given to an early-career vision scientist who has made outstanding contributions to the field. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical, or applied. The award selection committee gives highest weight to the significance, originality and potential long-range impact of the work. The selection committee may also take into account the nominee’s previous participation in VSS conferences or activities, and substantial obstacles that the nominee may have overcome in their careers.   The awardee is asked to give a brief presentation of her/his work and is required to write an article to be published in Vision Research.

Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev

Associate Professor, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology

The 2022 Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award goes to Professor Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev for fundamental contributions to our understanding of perceptual decision making and visual metacognition. Dr. Rahnev is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Harvard University, Dr. Rahnev obtained his Ph.D. at Columbia University with Hakwan Lau and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley with Mark D’Esposito.

Dr. Rahnev’s research seeks to uncover the computational and neural bases of perceptual decision making. He studies the top-down processes that modulate the normal visual experience, using a combination of neuroimaging, brain stimulation, psychophysics, and computational modeling. His early pioneering work on attention-related subjective biases has inspired new lines of investigation and stimulated debates among philosophers. In another influential line of studies, Dr. Rahnev used a combination of brain stimulation and neuroimaging to demonstrate the existence of a hierarchical structure in the prefrontal cortex such that progressively rostral regions control later stages of perceptual decision making. His more recent work has uncovered the sources of suboptimality in perceptual decision making and developed improved models of visual metacognition. Dr. Rahnev has received an impressive series of grants from NIH, NSF, and the Office of Naval Research and mentored many graduate students and postdocs. He has also spearheaded several large collaborative efforts, such as creating the Confidence Database and organizing a consensus paper where researchers in visual metacognition agreed on shared goals. Dr. Rahnev’s research exemplifies open and high-quality science that produces fundamental discoveries about how humans make perceptual decisions.

Bias and confidence in perceptual decision making

Perceptual decision making is the process of choosing a course of action based on the available sensory evidence. This process begins with a stimulus that is internally represented in the visual system. Based on the internal representation, a person makes a decision and can also evaluate this decision via a confidence rating. Progress on perceptual decision making ultimately requires an understanding of the stimulus, the internal representation, the decision, and the confidence in the decision. This talk will focus on recent work that begins to reveal the computations that link all these components together. I will show how previously unexplained response biases emerge from individual differences in the internal representation. I will also present a new process model of confidence that allows the unbiased measurement of metacognitive ability and fits empirical data better than existing alternatives. I will end by highlighting exciting new developments in the field that promise to revolutionize our understanding of the computations underlying perceptual decision making.

Dr. Rahnev will speak during the Awards session.

Monday, May 16, 2022, 12:30 – 1:45 pm EDT, Talk Room 2

The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Dr. Lynne Kiorpes with the 2022 Davida Teller Award

VSS established the Davida Teller Award in 2013. Davida was an exceptional scientist, mentor and colleague, who for many years led the field of visual development. The award is therefore given to an outstanding female vision scientist in recognition of her exceptional, lasting contributions to the field of vision science.

Lynne Kiorpes

Professor of Neural Science and Psychology, New York University

Lynne Kiorpes is a leader and innovator in the field of visual development.  Throughout her career she has integrated studies of human visual development with studies of both behavior and neural development in infant macaques to understand immaturities and the role of visual experience in the development of visual processing.  Her work on amblyopia has been critical in revealing the developmental changes in the visual pathways that may contribute to the disorder.  Her findings have highlighted the role of extrastriate cortical development and the importance of focusing on higher-level visual functions in amblyopia. Recognitions of her accomplishments have included a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award (2007) and a Presidential Special Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (2016).

Dr. Kiorpes earned her Bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University in 1973 and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1982, both in Physiological Psychology.  She took up her faculty position at New York University in Psychology and Neural Science after a postdoctoral position in Ophthalmology at the University of Washington, where she had trained with leading vision scientists Davida Teller and Anita Hendrickson.

Dr. Kiorpes has been consistently dedicated in her support of women and under-represented minorities aspiring to careers in science. She is currently serving as the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at NYU and was awarded a prestigious Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering Program Fellowship in 2015.  She founded the NYU Women in Science Scholars program and has served as the director of NYU’s NIMH-funded training program in systems and integrative neuroscience since 2005.  Her accomplishments in teaching and mentoring have been recognized with both the Golden Dozen Teaching Award and the University Distinguished Teaching Medal at NYU.  She has served in numerous innovative leadership roles in support of the mentoring and training of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as mentoring the students in her own laboratory, for over 30 years.

Linking behavior and brain development

“As infants get older they get better at things” was never a satisfactory explanation of visual development, especially because in some children development does not proceed normally – as is the case in amblyopia. The question of what mechanisms in the visual brain permit the maturation of vision is long-standing in the field. At the same time, understanding how that developmental process is affected by visual experience is critical for informing our knowledge of typical development as well as experience-dependent plasticity. To identify the neural correlates of visual development and evaluate brain-behavior relationships, establishing the macaque model for human visual development was essential. Our work has established that – contrary to expectation – developmental changes in neural response properties early in the visual pathways do not limit normal development or define amblyopia. In this talk, I will argue that visual processing beyond V1 is more important for understanding both normal and abnormal visual development.

Dr. Kiorpes will speak during the Awards session.